Year 5 - Ufton Court Residential 2022 - Day 2

Day 2

Dear parents and carers,

For most of us, we had a great sleep, for some of us, we had very little (after lots of chatting)! However, we were all still warriors and woke up at 7am to get ourselves ready for the day. Once we were ready, we had our breakfast to wake our brains up! We had lots of cereals to choose from (coco pops being the most popular) and 3 loaves of bread (for toast) were had between us all!

Our first activity of the day was ‘Life on the farm’ where we explored ‘What’s the importance of farming?’. We oversaw the work of helots (servants) who work hard on the farm, and we even joined in too! We had a go at ‘milking’ some cows and goats (not real unfortunately), which Giovanni and Luke were a pro at and who knows could become farmers one day, and we were amazed at how we had to pull the udders to ‘get the milk out’. We even had a go at grinding some grain to produce flour and for the first time, so far, there was silence as children concentrated to produce flour – Alesia, Summer and Alice were mesmerised by this! Many of whom were delighted with what they were able to produce! We then moved across to the orchard to collect apples – at first, we thought we’d be eating the apples but nope, we were wrong! Instead, we got to feed the apples to some pigs! We went into their pen and hid the apples around so the pigs could find them! We got to stroke the pigs, which felt like wire, and watch them go on their apple hunt! At first, a few of us were a bit scared of the pigs because of the noises they were making, but as long as we didn’t put our hands near their mouths, we knew we’d be safe! Some children even proclaimed after that they’d ‘love to have a pet pig’ – good luck to those parents – though Miss Scannell too has fallen in love with the pigs and the way they gobbled up their apples! We then followed this activity by feeding some goats. We took the goat feed into our hands, laid it out flat and the goats ate from our hands! ‘It felt ticklish,’ exclaimed Benjamin W and Orla told us all that ‘The goats were soft and adorable and we enjoyed petting them’.

Our next activity was ‘Spartan Military Manoeuvres’. Athena, played by Roxcie, and the King, played by Tala-Rose, did an amazing job at demanding everyone, their soldiers, to defend the city of Sparta from Athens and other city states. The children learned to march, the arrow block, spear throwing, the phalanx and sword to shield combat. By learning and practising these, they tested our courage and resilience to the core! Benjamin M, Michela, Joaquin and Luka showed of great spear throwing skills, Chloe showed of her wonderful defending skills when an opponent tried to cut her head off by pushing the sword back with her shield, Elia was defeated by Mrs Brownscombe during a sword fight and Max won a piece of ‘meat’ from his king because he won a running race, which he shared with 3 of his peers (though he had to rock paper scissors who he could choose!).

We then took a well-deserved break from the role of being from Ancient Greece and decided to head back to 2022 and treat ourselves to lunch – today’s lunch was Jacket potato with cheese and beans and lots of salad, including lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and coleslaw on the side. Juanlucas was a superstar this lunch time as he took ownership of serving cheese, for the jacket potatoes, to the teachers and his peers. For pudding, we had a Bischoff cupcake which helped us with our sweet cravings! We needed a big run around after this meal, so we went out into the grounds and all the children played games with one another – including the biggest child of them all, Mr Lyons, who enjoyed playing football with them all which they all loved!

It was then time to head back to the life of Ancient Greece. It was now time to carry out ‘The Agora Trading Game’ where we focused on ‘How did the city states survive and thrive?’ we worked in groups to discover other city states strengths and spend our budgets wisely on the trading floors to ensure our states survival. Jamie, Gabriel, Zoe, Lisa and Isabella showed great strengths in this game of teamwork and trading.

This evening, we’re going to be preparing for ‘The Festival of Dionysus’ and we can’t wait to tell you more about this tomorrow, following the event. Once we’ve finished up with our festivities, we’re going to have a relaxing evening where we’ll play board games, read books, colour in, have a quiz before having an early night as we have a few tired eyes today.

We can’t wait to continue with our Greek programme tomorrow but we’re equally looking forward to heading home too! We shall share with you tomorrow how our festival goes and more about the activities we carry out tomorrow too.

See you all tomorrow! We’re missing you all! Love from Year 5 xxx